Covid-19: the death toll in the United States from coronavirus reaches 200,000

The death toll in the United States from the coronavirus surpassed 200,000 on Tuesday, by far the highest in the world, reaching a threshold that was once unimaginable six weeks before an election that is sure to be a referendum in part on the management of the crisis on the part of the president of the United States, Donald Trump.

“It is completely unfathomable that we have reached this point,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University, eight months after the scourge first reached the world’s richest nation, with its state-of-the-art laboratories. generation. -Flight scientists and medical supplies reserves.

The death toll equates to a 9/11 attack every day for 67 days. It is roughly equal to the population of Salt Lake City or Huntsville, Alabama.

And it’s still going up. Deaths are occurring at about 770 a day on average, and a widely cited model from the University of Washington predicts that the death toll in the U.S. will double to 400,000 by the end of the year as schools and colleges reopen and the cold weather begins. It is unlikely to be widely available until 2021.

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“The idea of ​​200,000 deaths is really very sobering, impressive in some ways,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US government’s leading expert on infectious diseases, told CNN.

Johns Hopkins reported on the grim milestone, based on figures provided by state health authorities. But the actual death toll is believed to be much higher, in part because many Covid-19 deaths were likely attributed to other causes, especially early on, before widespread testing.

In an interview Tuesday with a Detroit television station, Trump boasted that he had done “amazing” and “incredible” work against the virus.

And in a prerecorded speech to the UN General Assembly, he demanded that Beijing be held accountable for “unleashing this plague on the world.” The Chinese ambassador rejected the accusations as unfounded.

On Twitter, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said, “It didn’t have to be that bad.”

“It is an amazing number that is difficult to understand,” he said. “There is a devastating human cost to this pandemic, and we cannot forget that.”

For five months, the United States has led the world by far in large numbers of confirmed infections, nearly 6.9 million as of Tuesday (local time), and deaths. The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but more than 20 percent of the reported deaths.

Brazil is number 2 with around 137,000 deaths, followed by India with approximately 89,000 and Mexico with around 74,000. Only five countries (Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Spain and Brazil) rank higher in deaths from Covid-19 per capita.

“Every leader in the world went through the same test, and some succeeded and some failed,” said Dr. Cedric Dark, an emergency physician at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “In the case of our country, we failed miserably.”

Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans have accounted for a disproportionate share of deaths, underscoring the health care and economic disparities in the US.

Worldwide, the virus has infected more than 31 million people and is rapidly approaching 1 million deaths, with nearly 967,000 lives lost, according to the Johns Hopkins tally, although the actual numbers are believed to be higher. due to gaps in testing and reporting.

For the United States, it wasn’t supposed to.

As the year began, the United States had recently gained recognition for its pandemic preparedness. Health officials seemed confident when they converged on Seattle in January to deal with the first known case of the coronavirus in the country, in a 35-year-old Washington state resident who had returned from visiting family in Wuhan, China.

On February 26, Trump lifted pages of the Global Health Security Index, a measure of preparedness for health crises, and declared, “America is ranked number one most prepared.”

That was true. The United States outperformed the other 194 countries in the index. In addition to its labs, experts, and strategic reserves, the US could boast of its disease trackers and plans to rapidly communicate life-saving information during a crisis. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was respected around the world for sending aid to fight infectious diseases.

But monitoring at airports was weak. The travel bans came too late. Only later did health officials realize that the virus could spread before symptoms appear, making detection imperfect. The virus also spread to nursing homes and took advantage of poor infection controls, claiming more than 78,000 lives.

At the same time, gaps in leadership led to shortages of test supplies. Internal warnings to increase mask production were ignored, leaving states to compete for protective gear.

Trump downplayed the threat early on, advanced unfounded notions about the virus’s behavior, promoted unproven or dangerous treatments, complained that too much testing was making the United States look bad, and disdained masks, turning facial covering into a political problem.

On April 10, the president predicted that the United States would not see 100,000 deaths. That milestone was reached on May 27.

Nowhere was a lack of leadership considered more crucial than in testing, a key to breaking the chain of contagion.

“From the beginning we lacked a national testing strategy,” Nuzzo said. “For reasons I really can’t understand, we have refused to develop one.”

Sandy Brown of Grand Blanc, Michigan called the death toll “heartbreaking.” Her 35-year-old husband and 20-year-old son, Freddie Lee Brown Jr and Freddie Lee Brown III, died of Covid-19 within just a few days of each other in March, when fewer than 4,000 deaths were recorded in the US.

“What really affects me is … if things had been done correctly, we could have put a stop to this,” said Brown, who has no other children. “Now it’s just amazing. It’s devastating. “

The actual death toll from the crisis could be significantly higher: Up to 215,000 more people than usual died in the US from all causes during the first seven months of 2020, according to CDC figures. Johns Hopkins put the death toll from Covid-19 during the same period at 150,000.

Researchers suspect that some coronavirus deaths were missed, while other deaths may have been indirectly caused by the crisis, creating such confusion that people with chronic conditions such as diabetes or heart disease were unable or unwilling to receive treatment.

Baylor’s ER doctor, Dark, said that before the crisis, “people used to look at America with a degree of reverence. For democracy. For our moral leadership in the world. Supporting science and using technology to travel to the moon ”.

“Instead,” he said, “what has really been exposed is how anti-science we have become.”